Old Faithful Visitor Education Center

The view from the large front windows of the new $27 million Old Faithful Visitor Education Center at Yellowstone National Park looks out at the famed geyser, which erupts into a tower of water as high as 180 feet roughly every 90 minutes.

"There is something about Old Faithful that seems to encapsulate all the passions and paradoxes of national parks," Edward Rothstein writes. "The Old Faithful Visitor Education Center acknowledges that: you enter the new building and you face a 36.5-foot-high pentagonal window space looking out on Old Faithful as if the geyser were the altar of a new form of cathedral."